Blue Waters awards 21 Broadening Participation allocations

To lower the barriers for underrepresented groups and communities for gaining access to leadership-class computing resources, the Blue Waters project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) recently announced a call for proposals for Broadening Participation allocations. The call invited proposals from computational and data analysis projects with requirements for which the Blue Waters resources are essential to advance their research, and who meet one or more of the following criteria:

Women, underrepresented minorities, veterans, or people with disabilities

Researchers in humanities, arts, or social sciences

A total of 21 proposals have been awarded access to Blue Waters' computing resources amounting to over 3.7 million node-hours for research covering a broad range of science fields. Included among the Principal Investigators (PIs) are ten females and two underrepresented minorities. In addition, there are four female and eight underrepresented minority colleagues listed as co-PIs. Among the lead institutions, five are Minority Serving Institutions and ten are within EPSCoR jurisdictions.

"We are excited to see the strong response to this new allocation category," said Scott Lathrop, Blue Waters' Program Manager for Education, Outreach, and Training. "These projects are demonstrating a sustainable approach to fostering a diverse community in pursuing computational and data-enabled research."

All awardees will be invited to the annual Blue Waters Symposium in 2019 where they will be able to interact with Blue Waters staff, other users, and present their research findings.

The following is a list of the PIs, their institution, and field of research. A summary of their research plans can be found on the Blue Waters portal.

Xiangdong Zhang, University of Alaska, Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Dynamics

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation's science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

About the Blue Waters Project

The Blue Waters petascale supercomputer is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Blue Waters uses hundreds of thousands of computational cores to achieve peak performance of more than 13 quadrillion calculations per second. With 1.5 petabytes of memory, Blue Waters has faster data storage than any other open system in the world. Scientists and engineers across the country use the computing and data power of Blue Waters to tackle a wide range of interdisciplinary challenges. Recent advances that were not possible without these resources include computationally designing the rst set of antibody prototypes to detect the Ebola virus, simulating the HIV capsid, visualizing the formation of the first galaxies and exploding stars, and understanding how the layout of a city can impact supercell thunderstorms.